How to Create Your CTE Strategic Plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz1BZh9juVE

Here’s the truth we don’t say enough: the work you are doing is too important to be left to chance, momentum, or inherited systems that were never designed for today’s reality. Career and Technical Education is no longer a “program.” It is the bridge between education and economic mobility. It is the mechanism through which we either perpetuate opportunity gaps, or decisively close them. And yet, too often, we operate reactively instead of architecting the future with intention.

I also know that CTE professionals are some of the busiest and hardest-working educators in the field, often juggling two full-time jobs at once.  Sometimes we get so busy implementing with excellence, that we don't take the time to chart our path with intentionality and develop our own strategic plan just for career education. Moreover, it takes time to think through not just the development of a plan, but also to ensure clear communication about the plan to others.  

I have helped multiple districts (and regions) outline such strategic planning documents.  Most recently, in support of a unified school district in California, I invested a year with their team to co-produce with them a 5-year CTE Plan.  In this article, I want to give you the secret recipe.  

Now, I know most districts already have some sort of accreditation or educational master plan. Most institutions have large goals and objectives, and perhaps even a Profile of a Graduate. But, I fervently believe every institution needs a three (or five) year plan, beyond annual Perkins and CLNA cycles, specifically to advance career readiness, career technical education, and career-connected learning.  

Can I be honest? I’ve actually been advised not to share this with you.  Because I’m told there might be some consultants/entities out there who will steal this approach and use it to market their own services. But the benefits of helping the field think critically about their approach outweighs any such concern.  The expansion and proliferation of CTE is more important to me.  So, just a few words to those who will try to monetize my approach without proper attribution: We talk to each other in this field.  

Now, let’s get on with it.  I have eight principles to share with you as you get started crafting your own CTE Strategic Plan: 

1. Don’t start From Scratch

Nothing occurs in a vacuum. Even if you are intimately familiar with an institution and have worked within it for years or decades, the first step is always to research and review any previous strategic plans, work plans, accreditation documents, and guiding documents. You need to assess the current career-readiness activities, platforms, metrics, CTE programs, successes, survey results, and activities via a document review and conversations/exploration meetings with key leadership.  Your findings need to be summarized in your plan to show progression and proper leverage. 

2. Listen

In every strategic planning focus I've been involved in, a pivotal first step is to solicit and incorporate feedback from internal and external stakeholders. This transcends a mere survey, although that is important. But also requires focus groups, in-person town hall meetings, virtual listening sessions, and broad listening sessions, meeting people where they are at – especially in their own department meetings and convenings.  This is where having an outside perspective is very helpful and beneficial. It's amazing what people will say anonymously, albeit not confidentially. 

I've been advocating for a decade that all students conduct informational interviews. It informs their next steps with a rich insight seldom gleamed elsewhere. And I believe we need to take our own medicine as well. I recommend you conduct selected informational interviews with key board members, district leaders, teachers/faculty, counselors, and parent/industry leaders to help inform your recommendations. Yes, it takes time. But, after initial research is completed, I have found this upfront process to be extremely important.  It ensures transparency of process, a culture of inclusion, broad feedback collection, and helps to cultivate universal buy-in. 

3. Ensure Alignment

Especially in education, it is important that your plan clearly indicates alignment with local, district, regional, state, and national guidelines. I'll remind you of something you already know: people may not intimately care about the success of your programs or initiatives, but they do care about the broader success of their own goals and metrics. So, if your activities align ultimately with what they care about, you begin to cognitively transform ‘passive support’ into ‘active commitment’ for your work plan.

4. Go beyond checking the LMI Box

In CTE and career-connected learning, no plan is complete without a comprehensive labor market review. So definitely make sure to check that box and include this section in your plan. This is not just about compliance to ensure programs prepare learners for in-demand fields; this is also about including Future of Work reports and qualitative employer analysis pertinent to your region to help inform your program recommendations beyond the (often rearview) data.  Even though no one has a crystal ball, there are some meta-trends and foreseeable impacts technology will have on every program area. Thus, I recommend you exceed mere labor market information (LMI) tables and also do a thorough program review of all your courses, pathways, and programs. 

Now, I must acknowledge a strong bias in this area as my PhD dissertation was on CTE program viability and discontinuation processes. (Feel free to read my first book if you want to do a deep dive with me here.) So, I believe all areas need a thorough program viability assessment at least every 2 years to ensure both our people and our programs remain competitive, supportive, properly focused, and at the highest quality possible. I recommend you build that process into your plan if you don’t already have that institutionalized in another policy. 

5. The M2P2  Framework 

Organize the feedback and suggestions you receive into categories that will enhance, expand, add, or shift four key elements: people’s Mindsets, institutional Metrics, CTE

policy, or community/business Partnerships.  I call this the M²P² framework.  Yes, buying equipment for a few programs, upgrading technology, and offering boutique wraparound services to a small number of students might be beneficial to a few, real institutional change begins to occur when your work plan is organized by these key elements. Begin drafting the strategic plan with focused activities and strategic investments that truly help to address Mindsets, Metrics, Policy, and Partnerships for long-term expansion and program success.  

6. Use Local Student Data

It is easy to dismiss national, state, and even regional data. Everyone feels their institution is different and unique. So, I also conduct what I call a “Neglected Majority” longitudinal data analysis, which quantifies the academic and employment success of district 9^th graders (to the extent data is available), all the way to gainful employment.  Spoiler alert: One’s local data is rarely as strong as people think it is - or want to believe it is.  It’s true!  Few approaches are more powerful than local data extrapolated out to the local student population to help convince, inform, and persuade colleagues to understand the need for, and power of, career-connected learning and CTE. If you want to learn more about this approach, samples I have completed for other regions are available for review/download at www.kevinjfleming.com. And yes, always collaborate with district researcher(s) for data validation and collection to ensure accuracy and to prevent any pushback upon your plan’s release. 

7. It’s a Partnership Process

It is imperative that you keep in mind this is a partnership process, not a document delivery exercise. If you deliver a beautiful strategic plan, but no one else has been involved in the process, then you have failed.  Arguably, the process is more important than the final deliverable. So, communicate often with key district collaborators in developing, reviewing, editing, and refining the plan; including the sponsoring department team, selected employers, the district marketing/PR team, executive leadership, and instructional leadership.  The goal is for them to say (internally), “Yeah, yeah, we get it already. We’ve heard you update us on your strategic plan 10 times already!” That is what successful over-communication will feel like. 

Also, remember that everyone else is busy too. So, I suggest you create brief status reports, one page or less, so the key personnel can be briefed on the process and opportunities to provide feedback.  No one above you in the org chart should ever feel surprised.  I've even gone so far as to have one page of the plan that outlines every meeting, convening, and opportunity people had to provide feedback - documenting every participating constituency group - to show the inclusive and transparent nature of the plan’s development. If you are concerned about potential sabotage or lack of support once proposed, such a table in your plan acts like a political shield that is worth its weight in gold.

8. Make It Easy to Share

I don't want to hurt your feelings. But very few people will actually read your strategic plan. Sorry, not sorry. That is a harsh reality I had to accept long ago. So instead, assume most people won't read the whole thing and make it easy for them to understand the main points. I recommend you write an Executive Summary and publish that as a separate document (linking to the larger document, of course). Create a PowerPoint slide deck that explains every section, along with a shorter version that anyone in the institution can use to brief their team or department on the plan’s key elements and main strategies without you even having to be in the room.  Lastly, ask for five minutes on other department agendas to share with them the strategic plan highlights and how their department can support, as well as benefit from, its implementation.  

A Few Final Words

A strategic plan is not just a document. It is a declaration. To paraphrase the CEO of Paxton Patterson, it is a declaration that student learning matters more than adult comfort. Your plan is a declaration that alignment matters more than autonomy; that evidence matters more than assumptions; and that the future of work will not wait for us to catch up.

If you take nothing else from this, take this: the power is not in the plan itself. It is in the clarity it creates, the conversations it forces, and the commitments it demands.  The Board-approved document is often a symbolic byproduct of what is truly important.  

Because when done right, a CTE strategic plan does something rare in education. It aligns vision with action, data with decision-making, and people with purpose.  So don’t rush it. (It takes at least 16 months to do it right.) Don’t fast-track the thinking. And don’t reduce it to compliance.

Instead, lead it.

Lead the listening.

Lead the alignment.

Lead the courage to confront what the data actually says.

And most importantly, lead the belief that our students deserve systems intentionally designed for their long-term success, before and after graduation,  not accidentally producing it.

The future of your students is already being shaped by technology, by economics, and by forces outside your control.  A CTE Strategic Plan is your opportunity to shape how they are prepared to meet it.

Be intentional. Be strategic. And above all, be unwilling to settle for anything less than transformation.

Partnership Exploration Discussion